


that mixed berry yogurt you’re about to eat has expired

by gingermaggie



Category: Gilmore Girls
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - The Office Fusion, F/M, Spoilers for A Year in the Life, fair warning this is a list fic, i will write it into a real fic someday, spoilers for the office
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-02
Updated: 2017-05-02
Packaged: 2018-10-26 18:08:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10791945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gingermaggie/pseuds/gingermaggie
Summary: Jess Mariano is not going to be a paper salesman forever.Or: the bullet-list Office AU no one asked for but I am happy to provide!





	that mixed berry yogurt you’re about to eat has expired

**Author's Note:**

> So as I mention in the tags, this is not a real fic, but a half-fic outline. It's posted in a slightly-less-edited form on my tumblr, but I decided to go ahead and put it here too. I do intend to make it a real fic at some point, but it's going to be long so it's going to take a while, which means encouragement and validation is always welcome. 
> 
> Basically, this is my 2am ramblings about how weirdly well Jess and Rory fit into Jim and Pam's story. Hope you enjoy.
> 
> \--
> 
> Title is from The Office, because of course it is.

  * Jess Mariano is not going to be a paper salesman forever. This is a stepping stone, like Walmart; it’s a day job to pay the bills while he struggles, strives, dreams, in the quietest corners of his mind, of writing. The novel is half-finished, always half-finished, but it’s not like he has that much energy left to write at the end of the day, after a 9-to-5 of idiots and drudgery and complete and utter bullshit.
  * Rory Gilmore always had promise, but that was never actually a good thing. She was smart enough to know affording Harvard was a pipe dream and the stubbornness she inherited from her mother prohibited her from accepting help from anyone—including her snobby and semi-well-meaning grandparents. All the scholarships and part-time jobs she could scrounge just weren’t enough, and the dream got put on hold.
  * Being a receptionist at Dunder Mifflin Paper Company was never the plan, not really, but Rory pretends she doesn’t see the terrible blend of disappointment and guilt in Lorelai’s eyes and makes it a point to gush about all the experience she’s getting and how the slow hours in the day are great opportunities for her to keep up with the news and write some spec pieces and definitely not waste eons playing spider solitaire and maybe, when she gets a little more saved up, she can start taking some online classes and getting a leg up while she figures out her next move.
  * (Lorelai can’t help thinking she’s been “figuring out her next move” for three years now.)
  * Jess’s deskmate, Doyle, can be irritating as anything and a prime target for pranks, but damn if he isn’t good at his job, in his own twisted way. He’s going to be manager someday, Jess knows, and God help them all when that happens, but the company’ll probably make millions.
  * Equally or more disturbing as coworkers go is Paris from accounting (though she likes to stick her nose in everything). Jess is pretty sure Doyle is sleeping with her, but he himself mostly stays out of her way except for a few specially crafted quips once in a blue moon. Rory has a lot of respect for her, though, as well as the required healthy dose of fear, and it’s not long before a begrudging friendship blooms between the girls.
  * (“We have to stick together in this male-dominated industry." “Is paper sales really the feminist hill we want to die on?”)
  * Jess is pretty sure he fell in love with Rory at first sight. He knows, he knows, even he thinks he’s cheesy and ridiculous, but those big blue eyes and bright smile were the first thing he saw when he walked into his first miserable day of a miserable job in a miserable office, and he guesses he imprinted on her, or something, like a baby chicken. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Rory immediately claimed him as a fellow newbie and an ally against the weirdos of Dunder Mifflin, pointing out each of them in turn and revealing any dirt she’s managed to dig up on them.
  * (“Quite the journalist there, aren’t ya?” he teases, and Rory blushes. “Hardly,” she says, but she looks very pleased.)
  * From there, it just makes sense to linger at reception whenever he can, to make faces at her during inane meetings in the conference room or throw paperclips at her while he’s bored on the phone. They IM when they don’t want Doyle to know what they’re talking about and coordinate their lunch breaks and shit, shit, shit, Jess is actually seriously falling for a girl probably for the first time ever. He tries, he seriously tries, to keep up the too-cool-for-school, the-world-can-suck-it attitude he’s perfected since grade school, but Rory Gilmore is pretty much kicking his ass and he’s barely two weeks into his job when he’s positive that today is the day he’s going to ask her out.
  * (That’s the day he meets her fiancé.)
  * Rory started dating Dean when she was 15. They’ve been engaged since she was 17, since the summer before she thought she would go to college, before her plans crashed and burned. At the time, Lorelai had supported her, but warned her about the dangers of a boy trying to lock you down right before you leave to find yourself. But it turned out she wasn’t leaving, so Dean didn’t really need to lock her down. Maybe that was why they’d been engaged for four years with no end in sight.
  * Dean had been consistently working construction since he graduated high school and ignored Rory’s encouragement for him to go to college. It was about a month after Jess started working thirty feet from her that he got the job in the warehouse downstairs, but Rory quashed the part of her brain that tried to debate correlation vs. causation in this case. Dean had always been the jealous type, but he had nothing to worry about with Jess. He and Rory were friends. That was it, end of story. She soon got tired of having to repeat that.
  * She knew, secretly, that her friendship with Jess was more than friendship, or at least more than her other friendships. It’s not like she had a lot of reference points, but he certainly wasn’t like Lane, or Paris, or Lorelai, though he was more like her mother than Rory would have ever guessed at first glance.
  * One day, sometime after Jess learns about Dean’s existence but before the latter starts working in the warehouse, Jess learns that Rory Gilmore likes reading. And that’s when he’s really gone. He starts stealing her novels from her desk when she goes to the bathroom and returning them with notes scribbled in the margins that make her glare at him with good-natured reproach when she finally gets them back. Soon he starts bringing five or six books to work on a given day instead of two or three, just so he has some options when she inevitably agrees to trade with him. They’ve read enough of the same books that they could fill the rest of their lives just with talk of those, but they’ve both got enough recommendations and knowledge of each other’s taste to push off and intersect those conversations at every turn.
  * If Jess didn’t think he was in love before, he knows know he has no chance of making it out of this alive. So he goes ahead and tells her all his dreams and passions, because what the fuck else is he going to do at this point.
  * (Maybe the worst part is that she loves his writing, becomes his number one fan in an instant. And when she tells him her story, about her mom, about her passions, about Harvard, he knows that despite everything he will probably never be good enough for her.)
  * From Rory’s perspective, it’s not long before Jess’s presence becomes what makes life at Dunder Mifflin tolerable, and they fall into a pattern that lasts _years_.
  * One day like a year after Jess starts at Dunder Mifflin Lorelai comes to visit Rory and Jess has never seen Rory so excited. Rory tells him all the backstory about being raised by her mom, the two of them against the world, best friends.
  * (“Which one is Jess?” is one of the first things Lorelai demands, at a whisper-shout, when she comes to the office. Jess is very carefully Not Looking at them, but he can practically hear Rory’s blush as she exclaims, “Mom!” and he smiles.)
  * Paris tries to stage a coup in the office eventually, propping up Doyle as a figurehead and letting him take the fall when it inevitably goes badly. This, Jess pieces together later, caused a substantial fight between the two that culminated in two months of giving each other the cold shoulder and then a rather passionate make-up in the warehouse that both emotionally scarred Rory and gave her some excellent blackmail material when she stumbled upon it. 
  * Jess has been working at Dunder Mifflin for a couple years when he tries to get over Rory by casually starting to see a girl named Shane who is as decidedly uninterested in an _actual_  relationship as he is. 
  * It’s fun enough while it lasts, but eventually Shane gets bored of him and they part ways fairly amicably. Simultaneously the best and worst part of the whole relationship was that Rory was jealous, Jess knows she was, she was terrible at hiding it. But she didn’t do anything about it. She glared at Shane when she visited Jess at work, halfheartedly tried to befriend her on the Booze Cruise without much passion despite claiming she wanted to get to know Jess’s girlfriend better, told him to give Shane his extension so she could call him directly and not go through her.
  * But she was still with Dean, and it wasn’t changing.
  * Of course, that didn't mean people couldn't see what else could be.
  * By the time something actually happens, it’s clearly inevitable.
  * Jess, for all his stony demeanor and witty barbs, can’t help wearing his heart on his sleeve. Everyone who saw him and Rory together knew he was in love with her. And everyone saw that, despite everything, Rory wasn’t leaving Dean. So Jess decides that he gets to be the one who leaves.
  * He goes to Stamford, when the opportunity crops up, because it’s plausible deniability—a pay raise, a slight title boost. Those are good reasons in and of themselves. It doesn’t have to be about Rory. Nobody has to assume that it’s about Rory. It’s just…a bonus, he guesses, and he tells Rory as much.
  * (“Aren’t you kind of…giving up, in a way?” the girl worries. “You want to write, Jess, not climb the corporate ladder.”)
  * (He scoffs at her, desperate to hide his bleeding heart under whatever armor he can scrounge up. “Look who’s talking,” he says, sharper than he means. “What the hell are you doing, Rory? You could have been anything, anyone, but you were scared, so now you’re here, in a deadend job, a deadend relationship—” He breaks off at the sight of tears in her eyes. “I…” he says, but there’s nothing else to say, so he changes his mind and leaves.)
  * Three months of something like hell follow, but neither of them want to be the one to admit it.
  * Paris used to mumble under her breath about how she half expected Mariano to lay one on Gilmore every time he leaned on that stupid reception counter. She lost actual money in a bet when Jess left without ever kissing Rory, at least to the best of Paris’ knowledge—which was pretty reliable.
  * It’s actually Rory, in the end, who kisses Jess first. He gets back from Stamford and she’d had no idea he was coming at all, just bumps into him in the parking lot as she’s leaving late and he’s coming to—well, she doesn’t know why he’s there, not technically. Not officially.
  * (He’s there to see her, of course. The gesture is there, and noted. She just beats him to the actual punch.)
  * She doesn’t mean to do it, and she feels like shit afterwards, because she’s not a cheater, she doesn’t want to be a cheater, oh no, is she a cheater? But she does it, she sees him standing there, leaning against her car, always too cool, and she doesn’t even know how to breathe. She walks to him, slowly, and his mouth curves into a nervous smile, just a hint of a sarcastic edge.
  * (“What are you doing here?” “I came back.” “But…why?” “I just…wanted to.”)
  * (She kisses him.)
  * (It’s everything and nothing like he imagined.)
  * She pulls away in a panic.
  * (“Don’t say a word!”)
  * She slips away from him and slips into her car and drives away, leaving him there speechless and alone but he can still feel the warmth of her against him. So he smiles.
  * Rory, for her part, feels like her heart will burst out of her chest. She’s smiling, but she starts to cry, because it’s going to get really good, her story, but she has to get through the hard part first.
  * She tells Dean that they need to talk, and he knows, of course, that it’s over.
  * He yells, of course, tries to talk her out of it. Tells her he loves her. She has to remain firm.
  * (“It’s Mariano, isn’t it?” he demands. “It is,” Rory says, “a little. But mostly it’s you.”)
  * It is without a doubt the hardest conversation of her life, but Rory gets through it. She drives for hours, goes to her mom’s house to spend the night. Lorelai holds her while she cries and stuffs her with takeout, and she promises her that everything will turn out alright, and that she did the right thing.
  * Rory takes advantage of the leave she’s accrued over the years and takes a week to stay with her mom and reevaluate her life. By the end of the week, she’s figured things out.
  * She sits down next to Jess in the first meeting of the day on her first day back, firmly, even though he’s refused to meet her eyes all morning. She takes his right hand in her left one, intertwines their fingers. She feels him stiffen when he registers the lack of a ring, and she smiles. He squeezes her hand, tentative, and chances a glance at her.
  * (“We should talk later,” she whispers, and he’s embarrassed by the force of his smile. This girl is going to ruin his rep, and he can't even bring himself to care.)
  * Later that day, Rory spends several hours researching online college prep courses. Later that day, Rory makes half a dozen pro-con lists. Later that day, Rory makes her way to her grandparents’ house with a proposal, swallowed pride, and high hopes, and leaves with a somewhat brighter future. Later that day, Rory kisses Jess Mariano again, and tells him that she might just be falling in love with him.
  * Later that day, Rory and Jess begin their happily-ever-after.
  * Rory is in the fall semester of her last year of college when she gets pregnant. She finds out after the company picnic—she had stopped working at Dunder Mifflin when she started going to school full time, but Jess was in his last days there, just months from leaving to live his dreams of being an actually successful author (though he didn’t know that yet).
  * Jess has his arm around her all afternoon, whispering in her ear and halfheartedly trying to convince her to sneak away with him instead of mingling with all her crazy old coworkers and ostentatiously showing off the ring on her left hand and signing up for the volleyball tournament.
  * (“You are the least athletic person in the entire world, Gilmore.” “I am almost a college graduate, I can handle a little volleyball!”)
  * Well, it turns out Jess is mostly right, because she hurts her wrist, and he easily takes the excuse to leave and take her to the hospital. Neither of them thinks anything of it when the nurse asks Rory if there’s any chance she might be pregnant, and then they’re getting called in to speak to the doctor, and—he can’t believe it. This life he’s living has felt too good to be true for years, and now he’s going to have a baby with the person he loves most in the world. 16-year-old Jess would laugh in the face of anyone who tried to tell him that was even a little bit possible. Hell, the Jess who knew Rory when she was with Dean would probably react the same.
  * But here they are.
  * Rory is terrified and delighted, making plans, making lists, doing research, throwing herself in Jess’s arms and holding him tight every few minutes, the biggest smile he’s ever seen refusing to vacate her face.
  * Barely a few days after they find out Rory takes a trip home to see her mom, convinces her to go for a walk and sit in the gazebo in the square with her.
  * (“Mom?” she says, and Lorelai responds, “Yeah?”)
  * (Rory takes a deep breath.)



**Author's Note:**

> Do you want me to make this a full fic? Tell me! I need validation to live! 
> 
> Come say hi [on tumblr](http://thebluestgansey.tumblr.com)!


End file.
